What ideologies are subverted when curtains assert versatility, sensuality and movement in spaces typically defined by fixedness? Cubbyhouse (Nothing is Certain, said the Curtain) merges the familiarity of Ali Noble’s existing textile-based practise, with the exploration of a new format, video.
Firstdraft’s pop-up classroom, Class S2, calls for you to tap into your child-like self with the materials, knowledge and memories collected and experienced by who you are today, making objects in experimental and hopeful ways.
In Unruly Edges, Ellen Dahl, Emma Pinsent and Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria have collaborated to create an imagined ecotone or contact zone, formed as the boundaries of their works dissolve and entangle, initiating new dialogues between their works in order to draw out previously unexplored or emergent ideas in their practices.
Kate Coyne's studio practice explores how experience can be embodied and the nature of the relationship between the body/experience and materiality in a socio-political feminist context. Temporality, the progression of past, present and future is inherent, with materials discolouring over time and gravity taking over form and identity in the same way that it does with an ageing, sagging body.
Join Kate Coyne and make your own inflatable characters, headbands, and bionic arms with upcycled materials (chip bags, paper and plastic straws!). Create interactive, air-powered creations that explore sculpture, wearables, and pop-up toys.
Knees, palms, forehead, bow down and kiss cool tiles. Like so many before and so many to come, humans find themselves present before shrines of many makings. Come craft a personal shrine with artist emoeba h♡rtbridge.
Learn how to do photo transfers onto homewares with Bonnie Huang and transform pre-loved ceramics with a collage of poetry and nostalgic clip-art images to give the unused objects new life.
Join Sehej Kaur and Kaylee Rankin for a community quilting session at Firstdraft. In strengthening and sewing together fragments or loose memories of each person's fabric, our host's offer an opportunity for reflection on community, solidarity and collective resistance.
Delivered in partnership with Hope St exclusively for Woolloomooloo Youth Week, the crafting of a wind chime using found objects seeks to generate mindfulness at a pivotal time of development. Firstdraft hopes to promote mindfulness towards young people’s personal wellbeing and attitudes towards the environment.
Join us from 5-7pm on Saturday 6 April for the opening of four new exhibitions at Firstdraft.
Join us from 5-7pm on Saturday 6 April for the opening of four new exhibitions at Firstdraft.
Within the shared realms that we move through lies a concealed network of invisible architecture that charts separate paths and boundaries. Soft Cell brings together work by five artists from the 2023 Firstdraft program to navigate these nebulous and unclear borders and ambiguous social constructs.
Join us from 2-4pm on Saturday 10 February for free artist talks with the artists of our February/March exhibitions; Charles Levi, Corey Black, Amanda Bennetts and Vedika Rampal.
Join us for our FIRST Exhibition Openings of 2024 featuring four new exhibitions by Charles Levi, Corey Black, Amanda Bennetts and Vedika Rampal.
Luddite/Sodomite is a series of four textile and embroidery installations that investigate the immediate link between labour and textile through a queer lens.
To be post-Partition, is simultaneously to be post-colonial. Yet the wounds of Empire still infiltrate and seep through folds of diasporic and intergenerational memory today.
You Won’t Believe The Snap In Your Throat examines the processes of digestion at the locus of industrial and post-industrial fabrication methods.
I feel the weight of the minute as I bend my body towards the clock is a multimedia installation examining time and the labour of self-care for the disabled and ill body.
Samantha Snedden
Join Sammi Snedden for free, all-ages weaving workshops on Saturday 16 December 2023 and Saturday 27 January 2022!
Megan R. Fizell
This project experiments with synaesthetic writing to test the potential of language to express the perceptual qualities present in multisensory art encounters. Following the increased reliance on web-based media to present contemporary art during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project responds to the growing demand to develop and expand the ways institutions represent and describe artworks online.
un Projects
Join un Projects on Saturday January 6th from 2-4pm for un Talks: RESIST/RETURN, an afternoon of readings by un Magazine Vol.17 contributors from Eora.
Join us from 2-4pm on Saturday 9 December for free artist talks with the artists and curators of our December/January exhibitions, including Samantha Snedden, Shannon Toth, Shahroud Ghahani and Olga Svyatova.
Shannon Toth
Food is a simple need for the body, eating is complex. Protector explores the sticky dynamics between food and self, and how these relations manifest as embodied experiences. Food can bring people together, soothe, comfort and celebrate, but it can also set the table for an inner battle.
Shahroud Ghahani
Remnants of a Dismantled State is a politically charged exhibition exploring the artist, Shahroud Ghahani’s experiences of exile, war and otherness through a feminist lens. Ghahani creates a portal into the memories of her past, a fragmentary connection to an imaginary homeland.
Join us for our LAST Exhibition Openings of 2023 featuring four new exhibitions by artists and curator, Samantha Snedden, Phyllis Stewart, Shannon Toth, Shahroud Ghahani and Olga Svyatova.
Curated by Samantha Snedden
The Enlightenment, curated by Samantha Snedden, seeks to disrupt conventional imaginings of weaving and woven work, specifically within the aesthetic scheme of the settler colony. A cheeky nod to the Age of Enlightenment, the exhibition reimagines what the emergence of new ideas can look like through a critical and playful use of First Nations weaving practices.
Olga Svyatova
So this is goodbye? explores ambiguous loss through the lens of the artist who lost their father in 2021 from Covid-19 in Russia. This highly personal and documentary exhibition draws on the photographic medium as one that simultaneously embodies both memory and loss.
Join us from 2–4pm on Sunday 15 October for free artist talks with the artists from our October-November exhibitions.
Ozanam Learning Centre Artist Group
Over the last few months, the ceramicists and artists at the Ozanam Learning Centre have explored the idea of Above and Below and what this means to them through a group ceramic work and individual 2D works.
A new initiative that supports artists working across video, film, and screen-based practice.
The works consider two themes; what it means to live, love, work and play on the peripheries of societal centres and the place of mankind in the ecological disasters and extreme weather events that are ever-present.
Nqa + Antoinette
A collaboration between disciplines and perspectives on the fragile balance between support and precarity in their lives, combining the ceramic-based practice of Antoinette O'Brien (Lismore) with the multidisciplinary elements crafted by local artist Nqa Blayed.
Dustin Voggenreiter
Homo “Bozo” Sapiens Problemo is a series of digitally animated GIFs, displayed on large LCD screens, partially concealed by prison-cell window frames. The project explores the idea of our limited capacity to understand the world around us - As creatures born with sense organs geared towards survival, we grasp at making sense of the complex, chaotic reality we inhabit.
Join us from 6–8pm on Friday 13 October for the opening of our October-November exhibitions at Firstdraft!
Join us from 2–4pm on Sunday 15 October for free artist talks with the artists from our October/November exhibitions!
On Friday 29 September, we're celebrating Firstdraft’s continual connection and collaboration with Western Sydney creatives with a party. Join us!
Join us from 2–4pm on Saturday 3 June for free artist talks with the artists from our June-July exhibitions.
Teresa Busuttil
Asleep with the Fishes weaves together Teresa's memories, personal beliefs, and family history with elements of fantasy. Using repurposed materials, including a salvaged boat, she employs assemblage and sculptural techniques, drawing connections with religious iconography and deities, while exploring her own place in the Maltese diaspora.
